Supercharge your website

Speed up and protect your site with Cloudflare

Making the Internet Work the Way It Should for Anything Online

Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet. Our Anycast technology enables our benefits to scale with every server we add to our growing footprint of data centers.

Proxy Servers and CDN

A reverse proxy is a server that sits in front of web servers and forwards client (e.g. web browser) requests to those web servers. Reverse proxies are typically implemented to help increase security, performance, and reliability. In order to better understand how a reverse proxy works and the benefits it can provide, let’s first define what a proxy server is.

A forward proxy, often called a proxy, proxy server, or web proxy, is a server that sits in front of a group of client machines. When those computers make requests to sites and services on the Internet, the proxy server intercepts those requests and then communicates with web servers on behalf of those clients, like a middleman.

A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content including HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos. The popularity of CDN services continues to grow, and today the majority of web traffic is served through CDNs, including traffic from major sites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon.

A properly configured CDN may also help protect websites against some common malicious attacks, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks.

CLOUDFLARE SOLUTIONS

Three primary trends — higher customer expectations, the rise of mobile, and accelerated globalization of customers and audiences — have increased the performance challenge of ensuring higher conversions, improved engagement, and reduced costs.

Performance Benefits

Global Scale
Cloudflare’s global Anycast network of 175 data centers across 76 countries reduces latency and time to first byte by delivering content closer to visitors. Cloudflare’s size and distribution of interconnects offers fast, reliable content delivery throughout the world.

Ease of Use
Setting up Cloudflare takes as little as 5 minutes. The easy-to-use dashboard enables quick configuration of fine-grained functionalities to improve the performance of Internet applications and APIs.

Increasing Internet Security Pressures
Websites and applications require the resilience and intelligence of a scalable network to combat the biggest and newest attacks. It’s important to ensure that performance is never sacrificed for security and that systems have easy setup and configuration, avoiding configuration errors which can introduce security vulnerabilities.

One of the largest authoritative DNS networks in the world.

Cloudflare’s global Anycast network powers our DNS service, resolving 60 billion DNS queries per day, and growing. More than 12 million websites, including major e-commerce sites, government agencies, and enterprises use Cloudflare DNS to make sure their website is online and always available to anyone in the world.

Ensuring the availability of your Internet properties is just as important as protecting them from malicious requests. Leveraging Cloudflare’s massive edge network means that instead of relying on only a handful of servers, you now have thousands of machines around the world making sure that visitors can reach your content.

Reliability

DNS
Cloudflare’s DNS service is powered by the same 165 data center network that powers our DDoS and CDN services. This not only improves DNS resolution times, but also makes DNS-related attacks and outages a thing of the past.

Cloudflare provides insight to your website traffic that you can’t get from other analytics programs

In addition to visitor analytics, you can monitor threats and search engine crawlers. For most websites, these threats and crawlers make up 20% to 50% of traffic. It’s traffic every website should understand, but most analytics services ignore.

Cloudflare works with popular analytics programs, including Google Analytics. Cloudflare augments all the information that you already love from your current analytics solution with new information that you can’t get anywhere else.

Over 10% of all Internet requests run through Cloudflare’s network, giving us unprecedented insight into our customers’ web traffic. Our edge sees all requests made to a website, regardless of whether it’s cached or uncached, the user has adblock, or they turned off JavaScript. This enables us to provide actionable insights to our customers.

Insights

Enterprise Logs
For enterprise customers, we can provide consolidated logs from around the world. These are very rich, containing detailed information about every request and response.

Threats
When we identify requests that are threats, we log them and block them. That means we not only protect your site, but also provide insight into the malicious activity we’re seeing.

Audit Logs
For enterprise customers, Cloudflare offers the ability to view and download the most recent changes made to domains or account settings, making compliance reviews and monitoring configuration changes easy.

Learn MoreDiscover how SecureNation can help you better protect your IT assets.